Chattanooga's Maker Faire Returns Saturday

At the Chattanooga Mini Maker Faire, there will be robots. There will be paintings. There will be painting robots. In fact, only one’s imagination is the limit at this FREE family friendly event. With more than 80 vendors, you can also expect fire tornadoes, Lego Brick Bot Battles, 3D printing demonstrations, a silent disco and fire dancing.

It’s a cross between a science fair, Lollapalooza and big party,” says Lookout Mountain’s Tim Youngblood, who helped bring the first Faire to town. “It’s basically a celebration of making.

Dubbed the Greatest Show (& Tell) on Earth, Maker Faires happen all over the world, celebrating the Maker Movement and showcasing invention, creativity and resourcefulness. Chattanooga’s will take place this Saturday, 10 am until 6 pm at the First Tennessee Pavilion.

Everyone from hobbyists to corporations will have booths, with loads of hands-on opportunities such as the Foundry in a Box, which allows students to melt tin on a hotplate and safely pour into a mold. With live performances, robot battles and food trucks, there’s sure to be a little something for everyone.

“We want as many people to come and geek out as they celebrate our culture of DIY and the American ideal of building things, inventing, and doing things with your own hands,” says Youngblood. “As more of our products become ‘one button’ there’s a built-in powerlessness, where stuff is thrown away rather than fixed. I think the maker movement is a reaction against that.

Most people were into making before making was cool – it used to be a way of life. If the lawnmower or your car broke down, you fixed it.

As a life-long maker, Youngblood recalls his dad teaching him how to solder and weld to repair things around the house. Pretty soon he was tinkering with computers, which led to a successful career in technology. In 2011, Youngblood relocated his cloud computing company CodeScience to Chattanooga, where he immediately recognized the maker culture.

Chattanooga has a fantastic heritage in manufacturing, but many people were not proud of that because of the pollution stigma,” he recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘How can we rework that?’

His first answer was helping form a makerspace called Chatt*lab. Shortly after, he partnered with Mike Bradshaw, former director of CO.LAB, and Nate Hill, former assistant director for technology at The Public Library. The trio coordinated a 3D Printing Day at the library’s innovative 4th Floor, which had just opened. They thought maybe 100 people would come; 1,300 showed up.

After that momentum, the idea for Chattanooga’s first Maker Faire surfaced. Planning brought leaders in the Chattanooga community together, fostering unprecedented collaboration between nonprofits, corporations and small businesses. CO.LAB was instrumental in the movement by providing an infrastructure of volunteers and meeting space. Today they dedicate staff members to help organize the event.

Now in its fourth year, Maker Faire highlights innovations that range from altruistic to opportunistic to just plain fun. Companies like HATponics will showcase their modular, sustainable farms with a two-story aquaponics system. GorillaMaker.com will demonstrate their breakthrough 3D printing technology, while the UTC chapter of ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) will show off their concrete canoe.

There will also be plenty of artistic vendors, including Studio Everything’s large-scale robot creating miniature paintings; 800 Collective leading visitors to contribute to a 5’x8’ pop-up mural of Chattanooga’s cityscape; and an Art Bike rodeo with Art 120.

The art presence is so important because without art, science doesn’t know what to build,” says Youngblood. “Art always leads.